Where The Heart Is

ELLE falls for chef Liza Queen's new take on old American recipes

Liza Queen has the word entelechies tattooed down her right arm. She sounds apologetic when she explains that it means intangible things becoming tangible. She's just not a pretentious person. But it's the perfect tattoo for her. With her 50-seat restaurant, The Queen's Hideaway, in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, once a hardscrabble Polish neighborhood, she conjured a divine oasis for spiritually depleted diners out of cinder blocks, Dumpsters, slumlords, and a bitter-old-man neighbor.

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One hears a lot about farm-to-table food: As I write this, San Francisco is preparing for its first Slow Food Nation happening. But restaurants that consistently buy from local sources are still the exception, and those that also manage to transcend the ingredient-focused menu clichés (heirloom tomatoes seven ways) are as rare as under-fished edible sea species.

It probably has to do with money (not to tediously invoke Marx). If you want to run a restaurant that caters to diners' stomachs, minds, and hearts, you really have to stake a claim in frontier country, the dead-industry scapes on the fringes of America's cities. It's in these more affordable outposts that the poets of the kitchen can still follow their muses. This is why Queen, a Syracuse, New York, native, opened her place in the pre-gentrified Greenpoint of 2005, after 10 years cooking in Portland, Oregon.

"We called it Deadwood," she says of the Brooklyn neighborhood. "That first summer you literally walked out the door onto wooden planks." But in her moodily lit, narrow boîte on a quiet street that infrastructure planning forgot, she can cook uncompromisingly, using the most dedicated farmers' produce and meat.

Queen, who trained in fine art at Oberlin College, cooks half intellectually and half intuitively. She uses the Hideaway to explore her fascination with original sources. "I start with the '70s Mr. Beard, Julia Child, Elizabeth David, then go back to their source material. I also love early twentieth-century community cookbooks."

Her inventions have a clarity and kick to them that's simultaneously comforting and stimulating. A good example is the way she dresses up the Dutch pancake, the traditional pan bread that is cooked in a skillet, then transferred to the oven to puff up. She tops one iteration with thyme, honey, Boucheron cheese, and jambon de Bayonne (a Basque-style air-cured ham). The sweet honey, creamy cheese, and melty ham with the pancake—buttery-crispy on the outside and soft inside—is crazy delicious, a party in your mouth where the guests include your most-loved friends and a few glamorous strangers just dying to meet you.

Her lovely salads, which look like Liberty print fabric in food form, feature gorgeous ingenue leaves such as buckwheat shoots and purslane, and accents like shaved raw rhubarb or pickled currants. You'll actually crave these salads; they make you fall in love, as the food critics have. Even the snipey media blog Gawker sang the restaurant's praises, calling it New York's "most bullshit-free restaurant."

With her originality, talent, fan base, and tough but sweet charisma, the 34-year-old Queen should be a celebrity chef. The problem is that she's too busy cooking. "I work from 8 a.m. to 1 a.m. six days a week," she says, pointing to the dark circles under her eyes. Because her standards for ingredients are so high and she's at liberty to hold herself to them, she barely makes a dime. As Americans know: Freedom isn't free, but when someone else is doing the work for you it sure tastes good!

Dutch Pancake
1 cup all-purpose flour
1 cup milk
2 tsp salt
4 fresh local eggs
1 tbsp butterMakes 8 pancakes
You should eat these pancakes shortly after they come out of the oven, or serve serially.
In a large bowl, mix all the ingredients until there are just a few lumps. Chill overnight or at least two hours. Preheat oven to 425ºF. Heat a 5" sauté pan on medium-high. Add 1 tbsp. butter. Add 1/3 lb of the best cup batter in a round, coating motion; let the edges bubble up and begin to set. If this takes longer than 10 seconds, your pan isn't hot enough. Pop the pan into the oven for 7 to 9 minutes, until the cake is puffed and golden.

What you do at this point is what makes this traditional recipe personal. The pancakes can be served as a sweet breakfast dish or as a kind of pizza or taco topped with any good cheese, fresh tomato, charcuterie, or bacon. Our current version: boucheron, thyme, saved jambon de Bayonne, and spring honey. (Add a handful of fresh thyme just before transferring the cake to the oven.) I've served it with panfried trout, zucchini piccata, and tomato-parsley salsa with Mexican crema and lime zest. Right now I'm thinking about using it with yogurt, mint, sumac, and a little tahini, to go with roast lamb and braised peas.

In a wide skillet, fry bacon on low, then remove and chop it. Add onions to the bacon fat and cook on low for about 30 minutes, or until they are caramelized. Add the bell and hot peppers. Cook on medium-low for 20 minutes. Add the corn, along with the cooked bacon and black pepper. Cook another 30 minutes, or until the liquid has evaporated and the mixture is just starting to stick to the pan. Add red-pepper flakes (optional) and salt to taste. If, for some crazy reason, there are leftovers, you can use the maque choux as a basis for corn pudding, or in a corn-bread or buttermilk pancake batter.

*To milk a cob, keep the "handle" on the corn when you shuck it. Hold the corn upright in a deep bowl. Cut the kernels off, then, with a butter knife at a 45-degree angle, rub up and down vigorously until the cob feels dry to the touch. While the results might seem small in volume, you are extracting the sweet juices still left in the corn, which will greatly improve the flavor and texture of this and other dishes that call for fresh corn kernels.